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Bitcoin's big push was to make central banks obsolete. It's a temporary success, long-term failure because the blockchain grows infinitely. Soon only big corp

Bitcoin's big push was to make central banks obsolete. It's a temporary success, long-term failure because the blockchain grows infinitely. Soon only big corps will be able to afford maintaining instances of the blockchain. The more successful it is, the less it achieves its original goals. Ethereum uses a blockchain and therefore has the same fault (although democratization is not a stated goal of Ethereum). I'm sure it will be a useful platform for some but the pre-mining thing leaves as bad a taste as all other alt-coins that popped up. It's the big-business version of the digital Ponzi scheme. I'm still waiting on Maidsafe.

Hexayurt 11y ago
Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions. 1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half. 2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions. Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history. And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)
- explorigin 11y ago
  Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.
  - Hexayurt 11y ago
    Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.
deleted 11y ago
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fleitz 11y ago
The block chain does not grow 'infinitely' it grows linearly at a predictable maximum rate. For any given point in time the block chain will be at max a certain size, given that Moore's law grows faster than the block chain we should be safe in assuming that any reasonable computer in the future will be capable of storing the block chain. Seriously, we're talking like 20 GB per year at current rates... The entire thing fits comfortably on an iPhone, let alone a $60 1TB drive. https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...

Hexayurt 11y ago

Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions. 1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half. 2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions. Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history. And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)

explorigin 11y ago
Thanks for this response. I'm not liking things a little less.
- Hexayurt 11y ago
  Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

fleitz 11y ago

The block chain does not grow 'infinitely' it grows linearly at a predictable maximum rate. For any given point in time the block chain will be at max a certain size, given that Moore's law grows faster than the block chain we should be safe in assuming that any reasonable computer in the future will be capable of storing the block chain. Seriously, we're talking like 20 GB per year at current rates... The entire thing fits comfortably on an iPhone, let alone a $60 1TB drive. https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&show...